After Obsession

by Carrie Jones

  “Who?” I ask him. “Who?”

  He goes cougar again and snarls. He is all teeth and noise. I wake up cranky and scared because I know that someone is in danger, but I don’t know who or how to save them, just that I have to find out before it’s too late. Wow, I hate dreams.

  • 2 •

  ALAN

  “What do you mean you don’t have football here?” I ask.

  Mrs. Wood, the counselor, is speechless for a moment.

  “This is high school. You have to have football.” I look to my mom in the chair beside me. “How can they not have football? Did you know about this?”

  “I’m sorry, Alan,” the counselor says. She really seems upset. She keeps glancing at my mom. “I thought I’d mentioned that.”

  “Mom? You knew, didn’t you? You knew they didn’t have football and you made me move up here anyway. Didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Alan,” she says, crossing her legs. “I did.”

  Back home, in Oklahoma City, a lot of my friends would have cussed out their moms right then and there. As mad as I am, I still can’t do that. I just slump into the chair like a balloon suddenly emptied of air.

  “Alan was second-team all-state in Class 5A last year,” Mom explains. “He’s really good at football. He’s a running back.”

  “Is there another school that has football?” I ask.

  “Not within fifty miles. We have soccer, cross-country, and wrestling,” Mrs. Wood offers.

  “Soccer? I can’t get a football scholarship to OU playing soccer.”

  “Alan has wanted to play football for the University of Oklahoma forever,” Mom explains before turning her attention back to me. “Alan, let’s make the best of this.”

  It wasn’t my idea to come to Maine. Maine? Really, who moves to Maine? Besides my mom, who brought us up here to live with my aunt and cousin now that they are husband- and fatherless. Nobody came to live with us just because I was fatherless, and I’ve been that way all my life.

  “Whatever.” It’s the best concession I can offer. “Put me in cross-country. Do you at least have track in the spring?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Wood almost fist-pumps, she’s so happy. She puts me in cross-country and track as the computer vomits out the page that is my schedule of classes.

  “Thank you.” Mom is all consolatory smiles. “We just got here over the weekend. My sister’s husband was recently killed—well, lost at sea, I guess. He owned a fishing boat and …”

  “Oh, the Dawn Greeter.” Realization fills Mrs. Wood’s dark eyes. She looks at me and asks, “So, you’re Courtney’s cousin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a sweet girl,” Mrs. Wood promises. I don’t really know if she is or not. I saw Courtney for a few minutes last night, but other than that we’ve only met twice in our lives. “It was a citywide tragedy when the boat was lost. All the crew was from here in town. Three of our students, including Courtney, lost fathers.”

  “That’s horrible,” Mom says. “I never understood how Lisa dealt with Mike going out to sea every day.”

  “Well, it’s a lifestyle here.” Mrs. Wood’s eyes slide around her office for a moment, looking at pictures of ships and a brass bell mounted above the office door. “I’m sure working men face some kind of danger every day back there in Oklahoma, too.”

  “Yes, but at least there’s usually a body to bury if something happens.”

  “True.” Mrs. Wood starts to say more, but a bell rings and the hallway outside her office fills with teenagers. “First hour’s over. As soon as things settle down, Alan, I’ll have our office aide show you your locker and give you a quick tour of the school. Then he’ll take you to biology.”

  I watch the flow of students but try not to be obvious about it. I see that a lot of them are looking through the glass window at me. The differences are pretty obvious and I know they’re taking it in. My dusky skin and long black hair are very different from anything I see in the stream of humanity outside the office. The father I’ve never known is Navajo. I steel myself for the usual crap that comes with my emphasis on my Navajo heritage. They’ll call me “chief,” make reservation jokes, ask for cigars and wooden nickels until I lose my temper and kick some ass. After that there might be some grudging respect.

  Another bell rings and the last couple of students in the hall run for open doors where teachers wait. A tall guy with short black hair comes into the counselor’s office and drops some books on a small desk set off to the side.

  “Blake?” Mrs. Wood calls. “This is Alan Parson. Today’s his first day. Will you show him around?”

  “Sure,” Blake says. I watch him look me over, then nod at me. I nod back.

  I follow him out of the office. Mom calls “Bye” behind me but I only wave, still mad about the football issue. Blake is a little taller than me, and he walks fast. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt with GOFFSTOWN HIGH SCHOOL CROSS-COUNTRY printed on the back.

  “You’re in cross-country?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Do you run?”

  “I guess I do now,” I say. “I can’t believe you guys don’t have a football team. In Oklahoma, every high school has a football team, even the little country schools.”

  “Football just isn’t a big thing here,” Blake says as he leads me up a hallway. “Plus, it’s an expensive sport, and, in case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t a rich school. We have sports that don’t cost much.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t thought about the cost. “Is the cross-country team good?”

  “Pretty good,” he answers. “I was all-state last year. We had two guys and three girls make all-state individuals. We’ll get the whole team in this year.”

  “That’s cool.” At least it was something.

  “Here’s your locker,” he says as we round a corner. He points to a tall yellow door. “Give the lock a try.” As I spin the dial to the numbers I’ve been given, he asks, “So, you’re from Oklahoma?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you come to Maine?”

  While I tell him why I left Oklahoma, I close the door and face Blake again. “Oh, Courtney. Yeah, that sucked about her dad,” he says.

  I follow Blake up and down hallways while he points out restrooms, the auditorium, classrooms, and the cafeteria. He offers commentary about various teachers as we walk, and I soon realize he’s one of the kids teachers love. Any negative thing he says about a teacher is followed with a positive. “Mrs. Bailey’s classes are hard, but she’s really cool. She brings cookies on Fridays.”

  Finally we come to a classroom door where Blake knocks. A guy sitting near the door jumps up and looks out at us through the narrow window before opening the door. He and Blake bump fists in greeting, and then Blake turns his attention to the teacher.

  “Mr. Swanson,” Blake says, “this is Alan Parson. He’s new here. He’s in your class for second hour.”

  More than a dozen pairs of eyes bore into me, watching, judging, making up stories about why I’m here. Mr. Swanson is a tall man with a thin white goatee and whitening blond hair. His eyes seem to sag, and he moves at a very leisurely pace as he comes to stand before me.

  “Hello, Alan,” he says. “Why don’t you take a seat right over here? I was about to give an assignment. Once I get everyone else working, I’ll get you caught up.”

  I go to the desk and sit behind a guy who needs a diet and in front of a redheaded girl who’s vigorously chewing gum. I settle into the desk and wait, forcing my hand to stay off the medicine pouch I wear under my shirt. Usually I wear it outside my shirt, but that’s back home. For now, the medicine pouch stays hidden.

  Back home I’d be in Coach Baldwin’s Street Law class right now. I suppress a sigh and try to pretend people aren’t staring at me instead of their books.

  I survive an awkward bus ride home and get off at the stop when Courtney does.

  “Sorry I didn’t sit with you,” Courtney says as we walk up the driveway. “Mom says I need to make yo
u feel welcome.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I look her over for the first time, really, since getting to Maine late Saturday evening. She’s short, maybe four feet ten inches tall, and very thin and pale. Her brown hair hangs straight and limp and she lets it fall mostly over her face. Behind her glasses, she wears too much eyeliner. She has on a black AFI hoodie and faded blue jeans. I guess she’s trying to be emo. I wonder if she cuts herself.

  “Did Mom give you a key to the house yet?” she asks. I shake my head. It’s a nice house. I have my own bedroom. “She will.”

  There are no vehicles in the driveway. I wonder if my mom is inside. She was supposed to have a job interview at the mill where Aunt Lisa works.

  “Mom says you’re going to live with us for a while,” Courtney says. I can’t tell if she thinks that’s good or bad, or if she even cares.

  “I guess so. You okay with that?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know,” she says. “It’s been really strange since Dad left. Mom was afraid she’d lose the house until Aunt Holly said you guys would come live with us and help out.” We step onto the porch and Courtney pulls a key from her pocket to unlock the door. “I’m glad we won’t lose it.”

  “Me, too,” I say. Sure, I’m probably losing my future as an Oklahoma Sooner running back, then going pro, but at least Aunt Lisa and Courtney will get to keep their house. “Why didn’t you guys just move to Oklahoma? Your mom grew up there.”

  Courtney gives me a look that says I must be the stupidest creature to ever stand on two legs. “My dad is lost, get it? Lost. He might be on some island waiting for help. He could get rescued and come home tomorrow. What if we weren’t here? What if he came home and we were gone?”

  I feel myself blink at her a couple of times as I try to comprehend that she really believes this. Could it be true?

  “Does that happen?” I ask. “Do people get lost in storms, then turn up later?”

  “It could happen,” Courtney says, her voice suddenly shrill. She spins away from me and runs through the living room to the stairs, leaving me holding the front door open.

  A sudden wind blows across the porch. It’s cold, but gone as fast as it came. I look at the old leaves it blows past me as they scatter off the edge of the porch. There’s a shadow racing with the wind. Strange. I hear a bedroom door slam upstairs.

  Above me, something seems to scratch in the space between the inside and outside walls of the house. I don’t bother to look up. Mice are mice, whether they live in the Great Plains or on the East Coast.

  I do my homework because there’s nothing else to do and Aunt Lisa only has basic cable. I’m just finishing up my science reading when Aunt Lisa’s car rumbles into the driveway.

  “I got the job,” Mom yells as she enters the house. There are yellowish wood shavings still clinging to her sandy-blond hair and her face is glowing as she pushes past her sister and comes to me for a hug.

  I hug her back, but not with a lot of enthusiasm.

  “You could have let us know,” I say in a teasing tone.

  “I left a message on the machine,” she says, pointing behind me to the telephone. A red light on the answering machine is blinking.

  “Oh, I didn’t think I should listen.” Never mind that I hadn’t even noticed.

  “Don’t be silly, Alan,” Aunt Lisa says. “You live here now. Mia casa is you-a casa.”

  This is the first thing I’ve heard Aunt Lisa say that wasn’t tinged with sorrow, so I force a chuckle at her butchering of Spanish.

  “Okay, I’ll remember that. Congrats on the job, Mom. I guess you started today, huh?” I pluck a curly shaving from her hair. It looks like pine.

  Mom laughs and puts her hands in her hair to shake it. “You told me I got it all out, Lisa.”

  “You’re such a rookie, Holly,” my aunt says as she walks by Mom and snatches another shaving from her hair. She asks me, “Did Courtney make dinner?”

  I hesitate, wondering if I’ll be getting my cousin in trouble if I tell the truth. They’re going to find out anyway. “No. She went upstairs as soon as we got home. I haven’t seen her since. They gave me a ton of homework.”

  “You can handle it,” Mom says. “Is Courtney okay?”

  “I think so.” I’m no shrink, but believing your dead father may return after his boat was lost in the North Atlantic doesn’t seem okay to me. I saw Titanic. I know people can’t survive for long in cold water, especially during a storm.

  “Well, I think we should go out to dinner to celebrate your mom’s new job and you guys moving to Maine,” Aunt Lisa says.

  Celebrate moving to Maine? Yeah, right. Mom claps her hands and says that’s the best idea she’s heard in weeks, that she’s dying to try some fresh seafood.

  “Sure,” I say. “Why not? I’ll go up and get Courtney.”

  Courtney’s bedroom is at the end of the hall, just past my new room. The hallway seems very dark, even though the overhead light is on. I know there’s something wrong. The hair on my arms prickles as I come to Courtney’s closed door, and I feel cold, like I’m standing in front of a freezer with a leak.

  “Courtney?” I knock on the door. The scratching noise comes again, right beneath my feet. I consider stamping my foot to silence the mice, but don’t. Why point out to Aunt Lisa that I know she has rodents in her house?

  “Courtney?” I knock again, louder.

  The cold air around me vanishes. It’s been sucked back under Courtney’s door. She still doesn’t answer, so I turn the knob and push. For an instant, there is resistance, then the door opens easily.

  Courtney’s lying on the bed, her eyes open, her arms rigid at her sides, her palms pressed against her thighs. It looks very weird.

  “Courtney? You okay?”

  Slowly, she turns her head to look at me. Behind her glasses, her eyes seem strange, magnified and too bright.

  “We’re going out for dinner. You ready?”

  “Sure. I’ll be right down,” she says in a dazed voice.

  I close the door and back away a step. Behind the door I can hear her moving, the rustle of her clothes as she sits up on the bed. Deciding she must be okay, just emo-weird, I go back downstairs. Aunt Lisa is picking the last of the wood shavings from Mom’s hair and talking about somebody at the mill.

  A couple of minutes later Courtney bops down the stairs. Her eyes seem normal again and she hugs her mom, asking, “Where are we going? Charlie’s?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Aunt Lisa says. “You guys ready?”

  Mom and I follow them out to their SUV, where I sit in the back with Courtney.

  “You’re in class with my best friend,” Courtney says as we hit the road.

  “Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Aimee Avery.”

  I shake my head and shrug. “I haven’t learned many names yet. What class?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “She’s gorgeous, but she thinks she looks like a Muppet. She has red hair.”

  I remember the gum-smacker in Swanson’s biology class. “I think I know who you’re talking about.”

  “She’s nice,” Courtney adds. “Check out the cop car.”

  I watch as a tall officer pushes some guy over the hood of a truck and cuffs him. The guy fights it all the way. “I wonder what he did.”

  “Probably drunk,” Aunt Lisa says. “More people have been getting drunk and disorderly lately. You hear about another fight almost every day. Must be the weather.”

  That night I wake up from a dream and sit up straight in bed. My eyes are open wide and staring in front of me but not seeing anything. It was a totem dream, a vision. Onawa, my totem cougar, was trying to tell me something. I lay back in the bed, my eyes still open. Reaching to the table beside the bed I find the leather thong of my medicine pouch and pull it to me, clutching it in both hands over my chest.

  My heart continues to race.

  Onawa was afraid. We wer
e in a forest. I remember that. She stood on a rock so that her beautiful tawny head was level with my face. Behind her, though … it was all black, like the forest was being swallowed in a black fog. Shapes moved in the darkness.

  Onawa had been saying something. Something important. I clutch the medicine bag harder, thinking, trying to remember.

  I was distracted. There was somebody else in the dream. A girl? Yes, it was a girl. She was holding a torch, or some kind of red light. Or maybe she had red hair? Maybe. But there’d been something about light, too. She brought light. Onawa, though, told me something, and now I can’t remember what it was.

  Then the mice start scratching under the floor again. Moonlight filters in through the thin curtain over my window. I feel sure there wasn’t that much light in the room a few minutes ago. It was pitch-black when I woke up. It was dark when the mice were scratching. Clouds? Maybe.

  I must have fallen asleep, because my alarm clock starts beeping way too early, jarring me back into consciousness. I turn it off and roll out of bed. The bare wood is cold under my feet. This is crazy. It’s never this cold in Oklahoma this early in the school year. I slip the leather string of my medicine pouch around my head and let go of the bag. My left hand cramps from holding it so tightly for … what? Four hours? Five? I flex my hand as I paw through a box of clothes with my right, choosing a black Metallica Kill ’Em All T-shirt for the day. It’s a little wrinkled, but so what? I slip it on, hesitate, then pull the medicine pouch out to wear over the shirt. I yank out the rest of my uniform for the day: black jeans, black socks, and my Army-surplus combat boots.

  I am not good at math. My transfer grade in algebra is a C minus, and it looks like it has nowhere to go but down as I sit in first hour staring at Mrs. Bailey while she scrawls numbers and letters across the chalkboard. She’s a short woman, late thirties, and not ugly for someone her age, but what she’s doing with those numbers and letters seems unholy. She tells us to work the problems on page 42, then goes to her desk.

  Finally the bell rings and books snap closed, feet shuffle, backpacks are hefted, and the teenage Pavlovian dogs move to the next kennel. I move with them, trying to remember my way to biology class.